Like life, sport isn't always fair.
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The best side doesn't necessarily win, as Liverpool discovered in this season's Champions League.
If sport was fair, Richie Porte's best Tour de France finish would be higher than the fifth place he achieved in 2016.
As the tenacious Tasmanian prepares for his 10th assault on the world's most famous bike race, he must feel it owes him a break - preferably not of the bone variety, again.
Reflecting on the previous nine reveals a tale of accidents, illness, self-sacrifice and repeated misfortune.
Colliding with a stopping TV motorbike while enjoying a potentially podium-delivering breakaway could be dismissed as a freak occurrence if it was a one-off.
Sadly, it was one of many similar tales of woe.
So as Porte forgoes attending the birth of his second child for this year's race, the cycling gods might like to consider offering him a sip from the sport's holy grail.
While wife Gemma labours over her own personal endurance test, Porte will be gazing into an assortment of French hotel room mirrors at a 35-year-old frame on which he can recall exactly where he acquired a frightening collection of scars.
Aside from the broken scapula collected when discovering a fellow cyclist laying in his path on a Brazilian mountain at the 2016 Olympic Games, most of those mementoes were - like the hotel room shaving kits - complementary of the Tour de France.
Porte has indicated this is likely to be his last Tour as a general classification contender. He will spearhead Trek-Segafredo's bid with Bauke Mollema, the Dutchman who joined him and Chris Froome in that close encounter with a motorbike in 2016.
Rumours abound as to which team Porte will represent next year, but it will almost certainly be as a domestique for a leader less familiar with birthdays beginning with the number three.
While yet to win a stage in the 14 Grand Tours he has contested, an asterisk could be added to each of Porte's three second-place finishes.
Both his Tour de France seconds (stage eight in 2013 and 10 in 2015) came while delivering teammate Froome to wins that would lead to two of his four race titles.
Meanwhile in the penultimate stage of the 2012 Vuelta a Espana, Porte came in behind Denis Menchov, the Russian who was subsequently disqualified from that year's Tour due to adverse biological passport findings.
To use a mixed sporting metaphor, Porte has runs on the board in alternative formats.
He is no T20 specialist who can't deliver in the Test arena. Like Glenn Maxwell.
Riding for four different teams at the elite level, Porte has won numerous other stage races including Paris-Nice (2013 and '15), the Tour Down Under (2017 and '20), Tour de Romandie ('17), Volta a Catalunya ('15) and Tour de Suisse ('18).
Despite his advancing years and the COVID-enforced 20-week hiatus, the Monaco-based Launceston resident has enjoyed a splendid 2020 season to date.
After a win at the Tour Down Under and third place at the Tour du Haut Var, he completed an impressive podium sweep as runner-up to another Russian, Aleksandr Vlasov, when returning to the scene of the bizarre motorcycle collision on Mont Ventoux.
Porte was also heavily involved in the business end of most stages in this month's Criterium du Dauphine - all of which gave new dimension to the definition of the word brutal by featuring more metres of elevation in a day than most social riders could manage in a month.
Each May for the last decade, I have caught up with Porte on the eve of the Tour to detail his goals, which were usually to try and make the podium in Paris.
A mixture of modesty and humility nurtured in the fertile paddocks of Hadspen generally prevented him talking up the chance of a potential win.
More often than not, I have subsequently spent June detailing stories of unfulfilled dreams, and I have to say I'm getting pretty fed up with it.
The coronavirus, bless its cotton socks, saved me from the chore this June, but only time will tell if the obligation has merely been delayed until September.
This year's Tour, which starts on Saturday, has been described as one of the hardest in modern cycling history.
It begins in the mountains around Nice - just 20km from Porte's European home - on roads he knows as well as the Sideling and Poatina Hill.
The next three weeks he has described as "a death march to Paris".
To borrow another another cricketing term, Porte is due.
Like a batsman seeking runs, a big score is lurking.
That would be the best, and certainly fairest, result for the former footy umpire.